Print this post.A L I L Y P A D is a floating leaf of the water lily of the white lily family. The scientific name of lily pad is nymphaea odorata. A bullfrog sits on a lily pad in a pond. The lily pad does not sink under his weight. Also flies and other insects find the lily pad an attractive resting place. The giant water lily, victoria amazonica, is the world’s biggest lily pad, up to four feet, and can support the weight of several people at once. The lily pad is quiet. It lies tranquilly on the pond water, offering rest for the frog.
____________________________
BY GAITHER STEWART | Oct. 4 2010
The American military jargon has adopted the lily pad to mean an outpost, an advance camp, a foreign base, or staging area, only one in a series of stops, a scaled down military facility with theoretically little permanent personnel, often used as a staging ground for Special Forces and Intelligence operations. Soldiers may then leapfrog from one lily pad to the next. The outpost aspect of the military lily pads however follows in the footsteps of the multiplying lily pads and especially giant water lily leaf: they not only multiply but also grow in size and tend to become permanent military bases encircling the world. Afghanistan is a giant lily pad, permanent, a place to move out from, a place from which soldiers go out to kill other people around that part of the world.
In US military thinking, the huge German, city-like bases for 100,000 troops are no longer necessary. Therefore America is “reconfiguring its footprint”—that is, reviewing deployment of troops globally in order to be capable of applying military force anywhere rather than to just sit in place. That is the lily pad concept, the analogy of frogs hopping around a growing number of foreign bases. Frogs-battle-ready troops. Saudi Arabia restrictions on the use of US bases there resulted in the construction of the Qatar lily pad. The air war against Serbia and the theft of its historic territory of Kosovo made possible the creation of the giant lily pad-state in the Balkans. Lily pads now dot Bulgaria, Romania, Czech Republic and northwards to the Baltic states, across the Black Sea to Georgia, another lily pad-state in the making, to lily pad-state Iraq, and on to Kyrgyzstan and Afghanistan, to a pier in Singapore. The circumference of the earth is the only limit today but the moon and Mars are not excluded from military Strangelove ambitions and dreams.
Senior Editor GAITHER STEWART is TGP’s and Cyrano’s Journal Online’s European Correspondent. A veteran journalist and novelist, his latest book is THE TROJAN SPY, a thriller in the mould of John LeCarré’s stories, but with a sharper moral center. Gaither currently resides in Rome.
NOTE: By last count (and no one can be precise since the US also maintains secret bases and intelligence installations all over the world), we had 737 bases and more than 600,000 soldiers manning garrisons or involved in countless operations in more than 200 nations, spanning the globe from Iraq and Afghanistan to Eastern Europe, Latin America, and the Pacific. To this, we must add hundreds of thousands of “private contractors” (mercenaries) —their exact number is also a secret— serving the needs of the global American empire. The only safe assumption is that the number of outposts and operations is growing.
2 comments
It always amazes me the ease with which this writer tackles an issue—of any complexity— and makes it accessible to the ordinary reader in prose that is both terse and elegant. His way of introducing us to the monstrous, cancerous “baseworld” created by the United States to protect its ruling class interests is exhilarating and even poetic! I will never think of lily pads again in the same way. Too bad that a thing of beauty is being profaned, again, by the sordid US military and its sordid missions.
Agree. Tis site is one of the few places one can read anti-imperialist arguments and information without running into heavy duty learning curves. Much obliged!
Z. Tyler-Herndon, Brisbane